Levels of Minority Representation in the T-14 Forum

[cdotson2]

Racism should not be a default explanation. It makes no sense, logically. There is no reason to assume that blacks and Hispanics do or should enter law school at the same rate as other groups. To illustrate my point, Asians, for example, are over-represented in engineering despite making up a tiny percentage of the population; no one would seriously contend that their representation is a product of racial biases as much as it is a matter of cultural preferences. Likewise, woman make up about 50% of the population, yet they are over-represented in fields like nursing and teaching; does anyone contend that this is a product of sexism? No. It's a product of woman preferring certain jobs. A better example still, I've been an NFL fan my entire life and I've never seen a black kicker; do you suppose that that is where white team owners draw the line? That they say to black athletes that they can play every other position on the field, except kickers because that's for us white guys? No. For whatever reason, black football players, despite being the majority in professional football, do not take up an interest in kicking at the same rate that whites do.

The bottom line is this: Simpy because 13% of the population is black and 17% is Hispanic, doesn't mean that 13% of every law school class should be black and 17% Hispanic. For one reason or another, not as many Hispanics and blacks enter the legal field and the ones that do are under-qualified. This leaves the top schools to fight over the handful of black and Hispanic applicants that do meet or almost meet their qualifications.

As to the reason I would like to see those lsat numbers: less than 50 black students, on average, get over a 165 on the lsat in any given year; Hispanics don't do much better. And, being Hispanic, I'd like to know why this is without having to resort to the lazy cop-out answer of: racism. One thing I have noticed at my law school is that many black students received a boost in lsat score of up to 15 points, and Hispanic students up to 10. But, when they share that information with me and I ask them how many times they've taken it they almost always say once. This is anecdotal, but my hypothesis is that, on the whole, black and Hispanics students do not take the lsat as many times at white students, which would,if correct, at least partially explain why whites have higher averages and blacks and Hispanics lower ones.

you are thinking of racism in the wrong way. Of course the problem is not Adcoms sitting in a room saying I hate minorities so lets accept less of them. The problem is systematic racism, which is caused by explicit racism in the past that has created a lock in model, that perpetuates the power position of none minoritys. And in fact the divergence of races and sexes in fields is called, by most scholars, racism and sexism. I agree that law schools shouldn't have to in an ideal world require that their percentages exactly mirror those of the population, however the fact that 88 percent of lawyers are white is worrying to me.

And your discussion on LSAT further proves why this is a racial issue, the education gap which is also systemic and institutionalized racism is likely the main cause of the difference in LSAT and GPA scores. though it is slightly better than the numbers you listed, it is still extremely low with AA and Hispanics combined make up less than 4% of all applicants that have above at least a 3.5 gpa and 165 on the lsat, this is not because of self selection, and in my view shows a complete failure of our society to meet the educational needs of minority students.

[A. Nony Mouse]

I'm pretty sure women being overrepresented in nursing/teaching has a lot to do with sexism, actually, and that the same is true for the other groups you mention in other contexts. Cultural preferences don't develop in a vacuum - where there is sexism/racism, that affects a group's choices.

That said, yes, I suspect black/Hispanic underperformance on the LSAT probably is affected by how many people take it and how often they take it. But that choice isn't always racially neutral.

[ih8makingscreennames]

So much to comment on

1. Asians being overrepresented in engineering (and science in general) IS racial. We (the collective) already expect them to be smart and hardworking. I had a friend who was not gifted in STEM and she hated life because people just approached her with that expectation.

2. I find it funny that you think women actually prefer being nurses. Like do you know how literally shitty that job can be on occasion? Sure there are some who want that and truly want that vs wanting that because every other woman they've known in healthcare has been that. On the flipside, people are weirded out by male nurses.

3. Testing CAN BE racism because we all know that tests are written to test the vocabulary, etc often accrued by white people. I took the Dec LSAT and I joked (but not joked) that I did well on reading comprehension bc the first passage was about black people.

If I was an adcomm for the day, I agree with fliptrip. I would be taking every student that was destined for anywhere else in the T-14. I would call on every alum that had at least a semi-positive experience and say reach out, donate, we are making this happen. I think with recruitment now, BLSA reaches out so they can have more black people go there so they can continue to have that critical mass, and as minorities we are looking for that critical mass so that undoubtedly contributes to our decision. Hell, I only visited Penn because someone said oh black people love it there.

[lymenheimer]

In case any of you haven't yet seen this (simply sharing in light of the cyclical and repetitive nature of this discussion):

[youtube]_7_xHsce57c[/youtube]

[Another1]

Racism should not be a default explanation. It makes no sense, logically. There is no reason to assume that blacks and Hispanics do or should enter law school at the same rate as other groups. To illustrate my point, Asians, for example, are over-represented in engineering despite making up a tiny percentage of the population; no one would seriously contend that their representation is a product of racial biases as much as it is a matter of cultural preferences. Likewise, woman make up about 50% of the population, yet they are over-represented in fields like nursing and teaching; does anyone contend that this is a product of sexism? No. It's a product of woman preferring certain jobs. A better example still, I've been an NFL fan my entire life and I've never seen a black kicker; do you suppose that that is where white team owners draw the line? That they say to black athletes that they can play every other position on the field, except kickers because that's for us white guys? No. For whatever reason, black football players, despite being the majority in professional football, do not take up an interest in kicking at the same rate that whites do.

The bottom line is this: Simpy because 13% of the population is black and 17% is Hispanic, doesn't mean that 13% of every law school class should be black and 17% Hispanic. For one reason or another, not as many Hispanics and blacks enter the legal field and the ones that do are under-qualified. This leaves the top schools to fight over the handful of black and Hispanic applicants that do meet or almost meet their qualifications.

As to the reason I would like to see those lsat numbers: less than 50 black students, on average, get over a 165 on the lsat in any given year; Hispanics don't do much better. And, being Hispanic, I'd like to know why this is without having to resort to the lazy cop-out answer of: racism. One thing I have noticed at my law school is that many black students received a boost in lsat score of up to 15 points, and Hispanic students up to 10. But, when they share that information with me and I ask them how many times they've taken it they almost always say once. This is anecdotal, but my hypothesis is that, on the whole, black and Hispanics students do not take the lsat as many times at white students, which would,if correct, at least partially explain why whites have higher averages and blacks and Hispanics lower ones.

you are thinking of racism in the wrong way. Of course the problem is not Adcoms sitting in a room saying I hate minorities so lets accept less of them. The problem is systematic racism, which is caused by explicit racism in the past that has created a lock in model, that perpetuates the power position of none minoritys. And in fact the divergence of races and sexes in fields is called, by most scholars, racism and sexism. I agree that law schools shouldn't have to in an ideal world require that their percentages exactly mirror those of the population, however the fact that 88 percent of lawyers are white is worrying to me.

And your discussion on LSAT further proves why this is a racial issue, the education gap which is also systemic and institutionalized racism is likely the main cause of the difference in LSAT and GPA scores. though it is slightly better than the numbers you listed, it is still extremely low with AA and Hispanics combined make up less than 4% of all applicants that have above at least a 3.5 gpa and 165 on the lsat, this is not because of self selection, and in my view shows a complete failure of our society to meet the educational needs of minority students.

[sflyr2016]

.

[fliptrip]

I have some more thoughts:

1. Racism is not mutually exclusive to other explanations/causes of phenomena. It can exist in a whole messy stew of causes for certain things we see. There are actually things cultural/historical about black people at least that would suggest an overrepresenation of black people in law school. Ideas like struggle and fighting for equality are ingrained in many black people's lived experience, so it would stand to reason that we would want to enter the profession that in some sense is all about that. It is also the profession that is most understandable and accessible--I should do the research, but I would be willing to bet it is the most represented profession on television (before you bring up cops, law enforcement in most senses is not a profession). To aspire to be a lawyer for most people is to aspire to be someone who talks and argues for a living on behalf of the weak against the strong or in the service of making serious money.

I think that the reference statistic being general population proportion is less than ideal. A better reference statistic would be proportion of college graduates, because only college graduates are eligible to go to law school. Using the general population statistic penalizes law schools for not selecting ineligible students who fell out of the pool much further upstream. A quick google tells me that 10.3% of bachelor's degrees went to black folks in 2009-2010 and 8.8% went to Hispanics. So in light of that, the problem is slightly less bad and shows that Harvard and Columbia at least are close to having a representative proportion of AAs in their classes and some schools have an overrepresentation of Hispanics against that statistic. So, alas I don't think I'll need to join Harvard's staff.

2. I agree completely with those who pointed out the ways in which socialization can manifest what we think of as natural phenomena that are in fact wholly the product of human intervention. Why are all the kickers in the NFL white? Because if you are kicker sized black and athletic, you are made to play cornerback/wide receiver regardless of how well you kick the ball. If you aren't athletic, you go play baseball or you don't play sports at all. Where do these future white NFL placekickers learn how to kick in the first place? Suburban youth soccer. I don't know if you know much about THAT culture, but it isn't exactly the most inviting subculture for black people of all stripes. There isn't some biological disinterest in being a kicker that exists in black folks.

3. No dean is getting fired for having a 5% black population. A dean will get fired if his LSAT median drops too far. In light of that, then, this is not that hard to understand at all. With your scholarship budget, which is finite, there's a point at which each marginal dollar for you is better deployed in keeping your LSAT median where you want it than in bringing another brown face to campus. There's a reason Chicago's scholarship offers to AA students are so pathetic. They basically are saying, look, we'll spend enough to get something that will keep us out of the school newspaper, but we aren't going to seriously spend to compete with Harvard, because we might drop a point on our median! Since I've made myself TLS' resident Stanford shill, let me at least explain that they are constrained by their aid policy...it's formulaic and not discretionary, so they can at least explain away their low numbers by relying on a native AA preference for Harvard, which is real. I'm pretty sure that the rule is, "diversity for show, medians for dough".

[Another1]

Racism should not be a default explanation. It makes no sense, logically. There is no reason to assume that blacks and Hispanics do or should enter law school at the same rate as other groups. To illustrate my point, Asians, for example, are over-represented in engineering despite making up a tiny percentage of the population; no one would seriously contend that their representation is a product of racial biases as much as it is a matter of cultural preferences. Likewise, woman make up about 50% of the population, yet they are over-represented in fields like nursing and teaching; does anyone contend that this is a product of sexism? No. It's a product of woman preferring certain jobs. A better example still, I've been an NFL fan my entire life and I've never seen a black kicker; do you suppose that that is where white team owners draw the line? That they say to black athletes that they can play every other position on the field, except kickers because that's for us white guys? No. For whatever reason, black football players, despite being the majority in professional football, do not take up an interest in kicking at the same rate that whites do.

The bottom line is this: Simpy because 13% of the population is black and 17% is Hispanic, doesn't mean that 13% of every law school class should be black and 17% Hispanic. For one reason or another, not as many Hispanics and blacks enter the legal field and the ones that do are under-qualified. This leaves the top schools to fight over the handful of black and Hispanic applicants that do meet or almost meet their qualifications.

As to the reason I would like to see those lsat numbers: less than 50 black students, on average, get over a 165 on the lsat in any given year; Hispanics don't do much better. And, being Hispanic, I'd like to know why this is without having to resort to the lazy cop-out answer of: racism. One thing I have noticed at my law school is that many black students received a boost in lsat score of up to 15 points, and Hispanic students up to 10. But, when they share that information with me and I ask them how many times they've taken it they almost always say once. This is anecdotal, but my hypothesis is that, on the whole, black and Hispanics students do not take the lsat as many times at white students, which would,if correct, at least partially explain why whites have higher averages and blacks and Hispanics lower ones.

you are thinking of racism in the wrong way. Of course the problem is not Adcoms sitting in a room saying I hate minorities so lets accept less of them. The problem is systematic racism, which is caused by explicit racism in the past that has created a lock in model, that perpetuates the power position of none minoritys. And in fact the divergence of races and sexes in fields is called, by most scholars, racism and sexism. I agree that law schools shouldn't have to in an ideal world require that their percentages exactly mirror those of the population, however the fact that 88 percent of lawyers are white is worrying to me.

And your discussion on LSAT further proves why this is a racial issue, the education gap which is also systemic and institutionalized racism is likely the main cause of the difference in LSAT and GPA scores. though it is slightly better than the numbers you listed, it is still extremely low with AA and Hispanics combined make up less than 4% of all applicants that have above at least a 3.5 gpa and 165 on the lsat, this is not because of self selection, and in my view shows a complete failure of our society to meet the educational needs of minority students.

@joeant
So why is it that, blacks and Hispanics don't take an interest in being apart of what is considered one of the most prestigious professions in the U.S? Do they have a mental tribe-man in the back of their minds telling them not to pursue it????? Maybe it has something to do with the opportunities they are afforded...like being able to go to college. The lack of minority representation at elite law schools is due to a build up of problems stemming from...wait for it...racism. It may not be overt racism expressed by adcomms (...we really don't know) but the historical circumstances of race and how people are treated differently because of race in this country DOES play a part. This problem needs to be addressed somewhere -- and it is in the lack-luster Affirmative Action policies practiced by adcomms - they are just not doing a good enough job utilizing those policies. Also, a 165 is a 92 percentile score-your measure of competence doesn't make sense at all. 92 percent of test takers are unqualified to go to law school? Give me a break .

[A. Nony Mouse]

Sorry, "cultural preferences" doesn't make sense without considering the very clear historical inequalities in the US. It's far too convenient to chalk up underrepresentation in politics, banking, academia, and other highly skilled/paid/valued professions to "cultural preferences." I just can't buy that the groups that have historically been seriously oppressed in this country somehow just happen to the the ones that are underrepresented in positions ofp ower just because they "don't want" to pursue those paths.

(Re: nursing - I'm not saying any of your relatives are being forced into anything. But historically it's very clear that women were shunted from medicine to nursing because that was considered more appropriate for their nurturing natures, and medicine was too difficult/required too much authority. Those facts resulted in a nursing being female-dominated. There are lots of reasons why that's self-perpetuating that have nothing to do with all women who go into nursing just liking nursing better.)

[Another1]

I'm pretty sure women being overrepresented in nursing/teaching has a lot to do with sexism, actually, and that the same is true for the other groups you mention in other contexts. Cultural preferences don't develop in a vacuum - where there is sexism/racism, that affects a group's choices.

That said, yes, I suspect black/Hispanic underperformance on the LSAT probably is affected by how many people take it and how often they take it. But that choice isn't always racially neutral.

So you suspect the reason there are so few (if not no) black kickers in the NFL has to do with racism? Your being "pretty sure" it's racism is precisely the attitude that I think is problematic. "I am pretty sure" admits to an assumption, and also admits to not being informed on it. That is why I would like to test that assumption. Trust me, as a Hispanic student I was pretty sure of that too. But then I got into law school and realized that many of the minority students were not as qualified as the rest of the student body, and did not tend to do as well for that exact reason. Sure, cultural preferences do not develop in a vacuum, but they need not be explained by some sort of abstract racist boogeyman you all call "the system" who is out there to keep blacks and Hispanics down. If by the "system" you mean government, then how would you reconcile the seemingly non-existent Asian political presence with their having --by far-- the highest earnings among races in the US. Perhaps it's the fact that their cultural preferences lead them to enter certain fields that tend to pay more. And, to your nurse point, almost every woman in my family is or is studying to either be a nurse or a teacher; not one of them was forced to do so; they simply prefer it because of the pay, hours, cost to obtain the degree, etc., all fit their personal goals. Another thing, too, is that they're all Hispanic, and perhaps they aren't rushing to be lawyers because of cultural, and not "systematic" reasons.

PERHAPS those Asians haven't dealt with racism on the level of African-American and Hispanics. PERHAPS Asians who are able to immigrate to this country are already from a relatively privileged background.

[Iam3hunna]

3. No dean is getting fired for having a 5% black population. A dean will get fired if his LSAT median drops too far. In light of that, then, this is not that hard to understand at all. With your scholarship budget, which is finite, there's a point at which each marginal dollar for you is better deployed in keeping your LSAT median where you want it than in bringing another brown face to campus. There's a reason Chicago's scholarship offers to AA students are so pathetic. They basically are saying, look, we'll spend enough to get something that will keep us out of the school newspaper, but we aren't going to seriously spend to compete with Harvard, because we might drop a point on our median! Since I've made myself TLS' resident Stanford shill, let me at least explain that they are constrained by their aid policy...it's formulaic and not discretionary, so they can at least explain away their low numbers by relying on a native AA preference for Harvard, which is real. I'm pretty sure that the rule is, "diversity for show, medians for dough".

+180.

Chicago basically gave me pennies LOL

[sflyr2016]

.

[jnwa]

Racism should not be a default explanation. It makes no sense, logically. There is no reason to assume that blacks and Hispanics do or should enter law school at the same rate as other groups. To illustrate my point, Asians, for example, are over-represented in engineering despite making up a tiny percentage of the population; no one would seriously contend that their representation is a product of racial biases as much as it is a matter of cultural preferences. Likewise, woman make up about 50% of the population, yet they are over-represented in fields like nursing and teaching; does anyone contend that this is a product of sexism? No. It's a product of woman preferring certain jobs. A better example still, I've been an NFL fan my entire life and I've never seen a black kicker; do you suppose that that is where white team owners draw the line? That they say to black athletes that they can play every other position on the field, except kickers because that's for us white guys? No. For whatever reason, black football players, despite being the majority in professional football, do not take up an interest in kicking at the same rate that whites do.

The bottom line is this: Simpy because 13% of the population is black and 17% is Hispanic, doesn't mean that 13% of every law school class should be black and 17% Hispanic. For one reason or another, not as many Hispanics and blacks enter the legal field and the ones that do are under-qualified. This leaves the top schools to fight over the handful of black and Hispanic applicants that do meet or almost meet their qualifications.

As to the reason I would like to see those lsat numbers: less than 50 black students, on average, get over a 165 on the lsat in any given year; Hispanics don't do much better. And, being Hispanic, I'd like to know why this is without having to resort to the lazy cop-out answer of: racism. One thing I have noticed at my law school is that many black students received a boost in lsat score of up to 15 points, and Hispanic students up to 10. But, when they share that information with me and I ask them how many times they've taken it they almost always say once. This is anecdotal, but my hypothesis is that, on the whole, black and Hispanics students do not take the lsat as many times at white students, which would,if correct, at least partially explain why whites have higher averages and blacks and Hispanics lower ones.

you are thinking of racism in the wrong way. Of course the problem is not Adcoms sitting in a room saying I hate minorities so lets accept less of them. The problem is systematic racism, which is caused by explicit racism in the past that has created a lock in model, that perpetuates the power position of none minoritys. And in fact the divergence of races and sexes in fields is called, by most scholars, racism and sexism. I agree that law schools shouldn't have to in an ideal world require that their percentages exactly mirror those of the population, however the fact that 88 percent of lawyers are white is worrying to me.

And your discussion on LSAT further proves why this is a racial issue, the education gap which is also systemic and institutionalized racism is likely the main cause of the difference in LSAT and GPA scores. though it is slightly better than the numbers you listed, it is still extremely low with AA and Hispanics combined make up less than 4% of all applicants that have above at least a 3.5 gpa and 165 on the lsat, this is not because of self selection, and in my view shows a complete failure of our society to meet the educational needs of minority students.

@joeant
So why is it that, blacks and Hispanics don't take an interest in being apart of what is considered one of the most prestigious professions in the U.S? Do they have a mental tribe-man in the back of their minds telling them not to pursue it????? Maybe it has something to do with the opportunities they are afforded...like being able to go to college. The lack of minority representation at elite law schools is due to a build up of problems stemming from...wait for it...racism. It may not be overt racism expressed by adcomms (...we really don't know) but the historical circumstances of race and how people are treated differently because of race in this country DOES play a part. This problem needs to be addressed somewhere -- and it is in the lack-luster Affirmative Action policies practiced by adcomms - they are just not doing a good enough job utilizing those policies. Also, a 165 is a 92 percentile score-your measure of competence doesn't make sense at all. 92 percent of test takers are unqualified to go to law school? Give me a break .

To be fair its not really about being qualified to go to law school. Class is graded on a curve. If a 165 gets into Harvard theres a solid chance theyll graduate near the bottom. The main reason minorities are underrepresented at law schools is lower scores. The lower scores are a result of numerous systemic problems. There is research that shows that African Americans still score lower on standardized tests even after adjusting for things like income and parental education.

Ill give the caveat that im Canadian and have become very comfortable living in areas with very few black people. Ill also say that having gone to the admitted students day at the University of Toronto law and seeing 3 black students and then going to Mich and seeing what seemed like a ton of students of colour, lack of diversity has never been a big concern for me as far as school choice. However when you say lack-luster affirmative action policies, im pretty sure most of the URM 165s already get into t14 schools. Getting those diversity numbers higher would require dipping significantly further down, im not sure that is a good thing.

[A. Nony Mouse]

I have some more thoughts:

I think that the reference statistic being general population proportion is less than ideal. A better reference statistic would be proportion of college graduates, because only college graduates are eligible to go to law school. Using the general population statistic penalizes law schools for not selecting ineligible students who fell out of the pool much further upstream. A quick google tells me that 10.3% of bachelor's degrees went to black folks in 2009-2010 and 8.8% went to Hispanics. So in light of that, the problem is slightly less bad and shows that Harvard and Columbia at least are close to having a representative proportion of AAs in their classes and some schools have an overrepresentation of Hispanics against that statistic. So, alas I don't think I'll need to join Harvard's staff.

-- fliptrip

Let's do that by degrees. I'd be interested to see what each group, on average, majored in. If 90% the 10.3% of blacks with bachelor's degrees studied engineering, and most engineers do not enter law, then it would explain why many of those grads to go to law school; conversely, if 90% obtained degrees in the humanities and people with those sorts of degrees tend not to go into or perform well in law school, then that would be telling as well. And if the sorts of degrees whites get are different than those that blacks and Hispanics get, and also different from those Asians get, then it may explain why some groups go into and/or perform better in some fields than others. None of this, by the way, needs to be explained by "systematic racism" -- surely a term that nobody really understands -- as there are other, non-racist explanations.

I'd like to see which degrees are most common in law school, and which lend themselves to performing well in law school. Then I'd like to see how this breaks down by group. If 50% of Hispanics are studying and obtaining degrees that, on average, do no tend to go into law, then that would be yet another factor that would get you closer to the %s you seem to be upset about.

Except that even if you do this, people don't choose specific majors in a vacuum. There isn't any reason why different racial groups should be disproportionately represented in different majors (especially controlling for income).

[Another1]

To be fair its not really about being qualified to go to law school. Class is graded on a curve. If a 165 gets into Harvard theres a solid chance theyll graduate near the bottom. The main reason minorities are underrepresented at law schools is lower scores. The lower scores are a result of numerous systemic problems. There is research that shows that African Americans still score lower on standardized tests even after adjusting for things like income and parental education.

Ill give the caveat that im Canadian and have become very comfortable living in areas with very few black people. Ill also say that having gone to the admitted students day at the University of Toronto law and seeing 3 black students and then going to Mich and seeing what seemed like a ton of students of colour, lack of diversity has never been a big concern for me as far as school choice. However when you say lack-luster affirmative action policies, im pretty sure most of the URM 165s already get into t14 schools. Getting those diversity numbers higher would require dipping significantly further down, im not sure that is a good thing.

So shouldn't there be a solid chance that a 174 at Harvard would graduate at the top of their class at Cornell? Why don't those who get such a high score go to Cornell if this is the case? Being rank 1 at a t-14 is certainly more prestigious than being a Harvard grad. I'm pretty sure Cornell offers such applicants large scholarship money as well.

The fact of the matter is, doors are opened by going to an elite institution. Black applicants are better served by going to an elite institution than a slow-track one. I'm pretty sure that this is the case even if they graduate at the bottom of their class (we also don't have the data for this assumption as well).

[sflyr2016]

.

[Iam3hunna]

To be fair its not really about being qualified to go to law school. Class is graded on a curve. If a 165 gets into Harvard theres a solid chance theyll graduate near the bottom. The main reason minorities are underrepresented at law schools is lower scores. The lower scores are a result of numerous systemic problems. There is research that shows that African Americans still score lower on standardized tests even after adjusting for things like income and parental education.

Ill give the caveat that im Canadian and have become very comfortable living in areas with very few black people. Ill also say that having gone to the admitted students day at the University of Toronto law and seeing 3 black students and then going to Mich and seeing what seemed like a ton of students of colour, lack of diversity has never been a big concern for me as far as school choice. However when you say lack-luster affirmative action policies, im pretty sure most of the URM 165s already get into t14 schools. Getting those diversity numbers higher would require dipping significantly further down, im not sure that is a good thing.

So shouldn't there be a solid chance that a 174 at Harvard would graduate at the top of their class at Cornell? Why don't those who get such a high score go to Cornell if this is the case? Being rank 1 at a t-14 is certainly more prestigious than being a Harvard grad. I'm pretty sure Cornell offers such applicants large scholarship money as well.

The fact of the matter is, doors are opened by going to an elite institution. Black applicants are better served by going to an elite institution than a slow-track one. I'm pretty sure that this is the case even if they graduate at the bottom of their class (we also don't have the data for this assumption as well).

Yea I'm curious to know whether or not the bolded is actually true. Seems overly assumptive.

[jnwa]

To be fair its not really about being qualified to go to law school. Class is graded on a curve. If a 165 gets into Harvard theres a solid chance theyll graduate near the bottom. The main reason minorities are underrepresented at law schools is lower scores. The lower scores are a result of numerous systemic problems. There is research that shows that African Americans still score lower on standardized tests even after adjusting for things like income and parental education.

Ill give the caveat that im Canadian and have become very comfortable living in areas with very few black people. Ill also say that having gone to the admitted students day at the University of Toronto law and seeing 3 black students and then going to Mich and seeing what seemed like a ton of students of colour, lack of diversity has never been a big concern for me as far as school choice. However when you say lack-luster affirmative action policies, im pretty sure most of the URM 165s already get into t14 schools. Getting those diversity numbers higher would require dipping significantly further down, im not sure that is a good thing.

So shouldn't there be a solid chance that a 174 at Harvard would graduate at the top of their class at Cornell? Why don't those who get such a high score go to Cornell if this is the case? Being rank 1 at a t-14 is certainly more prestigious than being a Harvard grad. I'm pretty sure Cornell offers such applicants large scholarship money as well.

The fact of the matter is, doors are opened by going to an elite institution. Black applicants are better served by going to an elite institution than a slow-track one. I'm pretty sure that this is the case even if they graduate at the bottom of their class (we also don't have the data for this assumption as well).

There is a solid chance that a 174 would graduate near the top at Cornell. Solid chance doesnt equal guaranteed. I agree that doors are opened by attending better institutions though. I wasnt arguing definitively one way or the other.

Also id guess that,like Flip said, the reason many the schools have similar the same level of URM enrollment is probably because beyond a certain level it starts to affect their ability to hit medians. So its less about people being able to handle law school with a certain score and more about maintaining the institutions numbers.

[sflyr2016]

.

[jnwa]

To be fair its not really about being qualified to go to law school. Class is graded on a curve. If a 165 gets into Harvard theres a solid chance theyll graduate near the bottom. The main reason minorities are underrepresented at law schools is lower scores. The lower scores are a result of numerous systemic problems. There is research that shows that African Americans still score lower on standardized tests even after adjusting for things like income and parental education.

Ill give the caveat that im Canadian and have become very comfortable living in areas with very few black people. Ill also say that having gone to the admitted students day at the University of Toronto law and seeing 3 black students and then going to Mich and seeing what seemed like a ton of students of colour, lack of diversity has never been a big concern for me as far as school choice. However when you say lack-luster affirmative action policies, im pretty sure most of the URM 165s already get into t14 schools. Getting those diversity numbers higher would require dipping significantly further down, im not sure that is a good thing.

So shouldn't there be a solid chance that a 174 at Harvard would graduate at the top of their class at Cornell? Why don't those who get such a high score go to Cornell if this is the case? Being rank 1 at a t-14 is certainly more prestigious than being a Harvard grad. I'm pretty sure Cornell offers such applicants large scholarship money as well.

The fact of the matter is, doors are opened by going to an elite institution. Black applicants are better served by going to an elite institution than a slow-track one. I'm pretty sure that this is the case even if they graduate at the bottom of their class (we also don't have the data for this assumption as well).

Yea I'm curious to know whether or not the bolded is actually true. Seems overly assumptive.

Theres a correlation between LSATs and 1l grades. Its probably underestimated since most schools cluster their entering class around 5 or 6 lsat points. But id feel pretty confident betting that someone who is 9pts below the Harvard median would finish lower than someone who was at the median. Not saying theres no exceptions but i dont think thats a big leap.

This paper also touches on it.
http://www2.law.ucla.edu/sander/systemi ... rfinal.pdf

50% of black law students were in the bottom 10% of their class. I dont think its because black brains arent wired for law school exams. It probably has more to do with the fact that the admissions bump is significant enough to put people at schools where they are less competitive than the average applicant. I dont even have a problem with that. I dont think people drop out at high enough rates from top law schools for this to be an issue.

[Another1]

To be fair its not really about being qualified to go to law school. Class is graded on a curve. If a 165 gets into Harvard theres a solid chance theyll graduate near the bottom. The main reason minorities are underrepresented at law schools is lower scores. The lower scores are a result of numerous systemic problems. There is research that shows that African Americans still score lower on standardized tests even after adjusting for things like income and parental education.

Ill give the caveat that im Canadian and have become very comfortable living in areas with very few black people. Ill also say that having gone to the admitted students day at the University of Toronto law and seeing 3 black students and then going to Mich and seeing what seemed like a ton of students of colour, lack of diversity has never been a big concern for me as far as school choice. However when you say lack-luster affirmative action policies, im pretty sure most of the URM 165s already get into t14 schools. Getting those diversity numbers higher would require dipping significantly further down, im not sure that is a good thing.

So shouldn't there be a solid chance that a 174 at Harvard would graduate at the top of their class at Cornell? Why don't those who get such a high score go to Cornell if this is the case? Being rank 1 at a t-14 is certainly more prestigious than being a Harvard grad. I'm pretty sure Cornell offers such applicants large scholarship money as well.

The fact of the matter is, doors are opened by going to an elite institution. Black applicants are better served by going to an elite institution than a slow-track one. I'm pretty sure that this is the case even if they graduate at the bottom of their class (we also don't have the data for this assumption as well).

There is a solid chance that a 174 would graduate near the top at Cornell. Solid chance doesnt equal guaranteed. I agree that doors are opened by attending better institutions though. I wasnt arguing definitively one way or the other.

Also id guess that,like Flip said, the reason many the schools have similar the same level of URM enrollment is probably because beyond a certain level it starts to affect their ability to hit medians. So its less about people being able to handle law school with a certain score and more about maintaining the institutions numbers.

If the level of certainty isn't high enough for those high score LSAT takers to attend Cornell, then it shouldn't be high enough for adcomms to reject reciprocal lower scoring applicants of color.

[jnwa]

I have some more thoughts:

I think that the reference statistic being general population proportion is less than ideal. A better reference statistic would be proportion of college graduates, because only college graduates are eligible to go to law school. Using the general population statistic penalizes law schools for not selecting ineligible students who fell out of the pool much further upstream. A quick google tells me that 10.3% of bachelor's degrees went to black folks in 2009-2010 and 8.8% went to Hispanics. So in light of that, the problem is slightly less bad and shows that Harvard and Columbia at least are close to having a representative proportion of AAs in their classes and some schools have an overrepresentation of Hispanics against that statistic. So, alas I don't think I'll need to join Harvard's staff.

-- fliptrip

Let's do that by degrees. I'd be interested to see what each group, on average, majored in. If 90% the 10.3% of blacks with bachelor's degrees studied engineering, and most engineers do not enter law, then it would explain why many of those grads to go to law school; conversely, if 90% obtained degrees in the humanities and people with those sorts of degrees tend not to go into or perform well in law school, then that would be telling as well. And if the sorts of degrees whites get are different than those that blacks and Hispanics get, and also different from those Asians get, then it may explain why some groups go into and/or perform better in some fields than others. None of this, by the way, needs to be explained by "systematic racism" -- surely a term that nobody really understands -- as there are other, non-racist explanations.

I'd like to see which degrees are most common in law school, and which lend themselves to performing well in law school. Then I'd like to see how this breaks down by group. If 50% of Hispanics are studying and obtaining degrees that, on average, do no tend to go into law, then that would be yet another factor that would get you closer to the %s you seem to be upset about.

Except that even if you do this, people don't choose specific majors in a vacuum. There isn't any reason why different racial groups should be disproportionately represented in different majors (especially controlling for income).

That is an absurd statement. There are an infinite amount of reasons why certain groups should and do choose certain degrees more or less than others. Are you suggesting that all white, black, and Hispanics should have the same interests? I would guess that few Hispanics major in African American Studies.Your suggestion, to me, is bigoted--it supposes all people should do as whites (or some other dominant group) do. Asians seem to go into engineering more than whites do, and that's not a bad thing. Woman go into teaching more, and that's not a bad thing. Heck black football players tend to want to play corner-back more than they do kickers, and that's not a bad thing. (Tripflip's suggestion that they aren't allowed to kick the ball at a young age is ridiculous and question-begging: why aren't they allowed to?) As they say: different stroked for different folks. Some groups are just less interested in law than others, and that's okay.

You underestimate the impact social norms have on behaviour. I came to North America having never played basketball in my life. After a few weeks of everyone essentially saying "youre tall and black, you should play basketball" i picked it up and ended up getting good. Of course i had a choice but it was heavily influenced just like decisions about what career path to choose and whether to play kicker.

[fliptrip]

That is an absurd statement. There are an infinite amount of reasons why certain groups should and do choose certain degrees more or less than others. Are you suggesting that all white, black, and Hispanics should have the same interests? I would guess that few Hispanics major in African American Studies.Your suggestion, to me, is bigoted--it supposes all people should do as whites (or some other dominant group) do. Asians seem to go into engineering more than whites do, and that's not a bad thing. Woman go into teaching more, and that's not a bad thing. Heck black football players tend to want to play corner-back more than they do kickers, and that's not a bad thing. (Tripflip's suggestion that they aren't allowed to kick the ball at a young age is ridiculous and question-begging: why aren't they allowed to?) As they say: different stroked for different folks. Some groups are just less interested in law than others, and that's okay.

First, if you're going to call something I've said ridiculous at least get my name right. Second, your argument collapses when you try to imply that black people are somehow less interested in law. Black people are overrepresented in the majors that typically feed into law school, yet are underrepresented in elite law schools because they aren't interested in law? That makes no sense whatsoever. I think you have a pretty limited understanding of the nature of preference and where anyone's preference set actually comes from. Treating what folks prefer as if it is the product of some sole source of determinism (gender/race/ethnicity) while completely ignoring the vast social complex that constructs those seeming sources of determinism will not lead to useful insights about social phenomena.

[sflyr2016]

.

[Another1]

Really didn't think the issue of systemic racism had to be proved in 2016. lol.